WHAT'S NEW

The first week of July was a busy one with three customers completing major implementations.

Alzheimer's Australia went live with their Australia-wide implementation, completing a six month project to migrate all states and territories from the previous system onto a single tcm 7 database using the new jurisdictions feature to manage the specific requirements of each state.

Ballarat Community Health went live with the new Community and Womens Health and Alcohol and Drug modules so that tcm 7 is now used for all key community programs provided by the service.

Merri Community Health completed their upgrade from Release 6 and implementation of the program management module within their brokerage and care respite services.

Congratulations to these organisations for successfully managing the transition to tcm 7.

We are pleased to welcome a number of new organisations to the tcm 7 user community and look forward to implementing with them in the next few months.

The IHE Australia Secure Messaging Connectathon held in April 2010 showed that DCA is one of only 3 vendors to achieve certification to the Australian Technical Specification: ATS 5822:2010 – eHealth Secure Message Delivery as both a sender and a receiver.

Testing was performed by the Australian Healthcare Messaging Laboratory (AHML) on behalf of IHE.

Click here to view the results of the testing.

The IHE Connectathon is the healthcare IT industry's only large-scale interoperability testing event where systems exchange information with complementary systems from multiple vendors.

DCA has entered into an agreement to acquire Ballarat based ArgusConnect, leaders in secure document exchange between GPs, specialists, allied health practices and health services.

In a separate arrangement, DCA is in the process of taking responsibility for the Connectingcare service directory an e-referral solution used by 19 Victorian primary care partnerships (PCPs).

"Our objective will be to improve interoperability between tcm 7, Argus, Connectingcare and collaborate with other software vendors to facilitate exchange of referrals, notifications, discharge summaries and other electronic documents", said Peter Young, DCA's  General Manager Health & Community Services. "Our vision is to build upon the emerging open interoperability standards as developed by the National e-Health Transition Authority (NeHTA)" to improve communication between health, community care and aged care providers and thereby generate improved efficiencies in healthcare service delivery."

Ballarat Community Health has decided to upgrade to  tcm 7 with expanded reach across all major program areas supported by their organisation. The system will provide a single solution for clinical services, counseling, mental health, housing assistance and nursing, and group activities. Development with DCA will ensure statutory reporting compliance  for the major state and federal funding bodies. The system will also facilitate secure e-referral between the community health service and other organisations within the Grampians region. The plan is to have all services running in production by July 2010.

"The enhanced system will consolidate client records from a number of  existing applications and  ad hoc systems into a single enterprise application that will enable us to better deliver services to clients into the future", said Robyn Reeves, CEO.

A new national information system to support the delivery of care to people suffering from dementia will be implemented in all states and territories during 2010. DCA been contracted by Alzheimer's Australia to implement tcm 7 as a national database, including migration of data from the existing application.

"What we have embarked upon will change the client experience, deliver more client time and provide a foundation for future national collaboration and unity", said Roger Parenzee, project manager for the Alzheimer's Australia project.

The new application will support service specific dementia assessment, management of individual and group services, and incorporate a new national dementia reporting system.